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Before the Great Migration north

Before the Great Migration north

Benjamin “PAP” Singleton

Before the Great Migration north

In a series of interesting lectures and presentations the Maury County African-American Heritage Society focused on the topic of “The Great Migration: 1910 to 1970,” when nearly 6 million African Americans migrated from the Old South to northern states and cities. In November, I was invited to speak on Maury County’s own “Great Exodus” of African Americans to Kansas in 1874-1875.

Following the passage of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that formally freed the slaves (June 13, 1866), Tennessee was readmitted to the United States of America.

In 1866, a chapter of the newly formed Klu Klux Klan was organized and began a series of terrorists’ raids and lynching’s in Maury County.

In August, 1867, Samuel M. Arnell a state representative organized over 1,000 Maury County African American men in the “Maury County Union League” and marched to the courthouse to vote in an election for the first time.

In early 1868, the Radical Republican 39th Congress with Samuel Arnell as the congressman from Maury County passed the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (first Voters Right Act).

About this same time, the KKK organized its Democratic political front organization in Maury County called “Palefaces Camp No. 1.”

In 1868, several Maury County blacks and some whites were lynched, including the lynching of a black woman who had dared to strike a white woman back after being beaten with a rod. Throughout 1869, the lynching’s continued in Maury County as well as Middle Tennessee. In February 1869, Gov. William Brownlow was forced to call martial law over 11 Middle Tennessee counties, including Maury County.

In the midst of this terrorism, the first of several black conventions was called in Nashville to consider migrating to Kansas where land grants were offered and land prices were considerably lower than in Middle Tennessee.

These black migration conventions were led by Robert Knowles, Nelson Walker and Randall Brown. In the 1869 Republican Banner, a Nashville newspaper, quoted Brown as a delegate in the convention saying, “My heart bleeds for my people. We have 5,000 colored men in the vicinity and God knows how they are supported now, and how they exist in the future. How long are we to be hewers of wood and drawers of water? ... Let us go where we can grow Lawyers, Doctors and Teachers, where we can do as good as anyone else in our society.”

In early 1875, the Columbia Herald reported that many white land owners in Maury County were complaining that over 500 black males had migrated to Kansas and complained about the lack of labor to work their fields. In late 1875, the Herald reported that hundreds more Maury County blacks had left for Kansas. In all, between 1874 and 1879 it’s estimated that over 1,500 African-Americans from Maury County migrated to Kansas.

The decision to migrate was not an easy one because the majority of these residents had never been outside of Maury County and had no resources or money for the journey undertaken by foot, train or riverboat.

The author, Stephen Ash of the book, “Middle Tennessee Society Transformed; 1860-1870,” listed three social/economic factors facing African-Americans at that time: First, the economic foundation (land) of the upper elite class remained intact when President Andrew Johnson granted the former Confederate officers amnesty; second, aristocratic civil authority survived the war intact under the Democratic Party and; third, Middle Tennessee common white people continued to sanction the traditional Old South class structure.

In the mid 1870s, a former escaped slave named Benjamin “PAP” Singleton of Nashville organized the “Exodus” of African-Americans to Kansas. These blacks became known as “Exodusters” and established several African-American towns across Kansas, some of which still exist today. A severe two-year drought hit Kansas in 1874-75 that caused the Nashville black colony in Cherokee County, Kan., to collapse. These Tennessee Exodusters moved to Topeka, Kan., and settled in a 10-block area that was later called “Little Tennessee,” where many of Maury County’s blacks settled.

Eighty years later, the segregated Monroe Elementary School in the “Little Tennessee” neighborhood of Topeka became the center of a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court decision called Brown v Board of Education.

This decision brought an end to legal segregation in our public schools. The case was named for Mr. Oliver Brown and his 9-year-old daughter, Linda Brown, who was forced to walk over a mile across a railroad yard to go to her fourth-grade class in the Monroe school when a white school was only a block away from her home.

Did Mr. Brown and Linda have roots to Maury County? I would like to think so, but only more research will tell us the answer to that question.

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